Glorious Alpha Two Testers!
Phase I of Alpha Two testing will occur on weekends. Each weekend is scheduled to start on Fridays at 10 AM PT and end on Sundays at 10 PM PT. Find out more here.
Check out Alpha Two Announcements here to see the latest Alpha Two news and update notes.
Our quickest Alpha Two updates are in Discord. Testers with Alpha Two access can chat in Alpha Two channels by connecting your Discord and Intrepid accounts here.
Phase I of Alpha Two testing will occur on weekends. Each weekend is scheduled to start on Fridays at 10 AM PT and end on Sundays at 10 PM PT. Find out more here.
Check out Alpha Two Announcements here to see the latest Alpha Two news and update notes.
Our quickest Alpha Two updates are in Discord. Testers with Alpha Two access can chat in Alpha Two channels by connecting your Discord and Intrepid accounts here.
Letter to Steven from Star Wars Galaxies (PreCU) player(s)
Letter to Steven from Star Wars Galaxies (PreCU) player(s)
We have been waiting for you. Years and Years. The Ancients foretold that there would be another..MMORPG worthy.
We like everything so far for the most part.
Keep it hard and never cater to the casual player.
It’s all about economy. Make crafting hard. Make resources dynamic spawns (changing every 10-21 days randomly) Have resources have some sort of quality to them (random), so that over time, as better resources spawn, crafted items get even better. “Does anybody have 1000 units of that reindeer hide that spawned 5 months ago? Paying 10 CPU!” is a good thread to see in the trade forums.
Have creatures and the world spawn good items, and bad. Also have super rare ones drop with DOT’s, that cannot be duplicated by crafters. Because of decay and breakage, this will be ok.
Back in SWG, half the server would meet in Theed to see some player, who got an uber drop, just to have him show it to you in the trade window, then accept the /duel, and die with pleasure to it. These weapons would be so powerful, that the player would RE-GRIND his character to a class that could use it, or sell it.
Don’t have the server drop too many weapons or armor or potions or …let crafters make it most of it. There is nothing like watching the evolution of a server from launch, and armor and weapons slowly getting better over time because of resource shifts, or new looted schematics. Don’t forget the power of looted schematics. Don’t forget you can cap how many of this uber schematics product I can make if need be, to control rarity.
Take it from a former Master Armorsmith AND Chef in SWG….twice (ground 2 characters with same spec) Make it hard and painful, almost impossible, for those upper levels of whatever you have planned for us in the crafting world. I know what it’s like to click and break 2 mice from grinding Ubese Armor shirts 73,962 times 2 weeks straight……..cuz once you get to Master…everything changes.
The secret to a good economy is to not have server drops nullify crafters experience. The game gets ruined when a character has all his ‘purple tier 4 gear’ from drops.
Please don’t have static spawns for resources…nothing is worse, than knowing ‘there are always 3 cotton nodes over by Sunnybrook river’, only to find it camped eternally.
Don’t do it.
Dynamic spawns that move is key.
Don’t worry. Us die hards (and it doesn’t take too many) will find it.
We love you Steven for no or very rare flying mounts/ limited fast travel.
We love you for decay and no Pay to Win.
We love you for no bound items!
Keep the Flag and Temporary Enemy Flag (TEF) system for pvp and caravans..brilliant!
If two weeks into official game launch, I see or hear about there already being a level 80 (or whatever max is at launch) Tank or Mage, your game has failed, always remember this!
Make those upper levels take OBSCENE amounts of experience to get….
Too many alt’s on one account ruins a server as well. I’ll just keep making characters to fill the void that supply and demand has left open. I’m fine with buying a second account and paying for 2 years’ worth of subs for 2 accounts.
Getting a city to Metropolis level needs to be fricking insanely hard, expensive, and time consuming. Casual players can always join the city later, but let the die hards, who are all 35 years old +with super PC’s, shape the world, and inspire newer players, who think WoW is a good game.
We are the ones who will take 1 week Paid Time Off to sync with launch day with our guild (after doing a dry run or 2 in Alpha and Beta) to execute our plan and get our node.
We are the ones who spent $100 + on kickstarter for a game 2 years away, because some guy on the internet (You Steven) has said ALL the right things in your videos.
Keep mentioning Evercrack 1 and 2 and SWG in all your press releases. (That’s what drew me and my friend’s attention to Ashes of Creation)
Allow us to drag and resize our GUI from launch..not some patch later.
Built in Discord..Great! You are already ahead of me.
Emotes with animations /dance of course!. Don’t forget /pizza
8 races..great! have 9 languages. (basic plus 8 races) Let me learn a language from another player, or maybe even quests. (Don’t forget Role-Players!)
10,000 concurrent players! ? really… this is epic. I sure hope no expense is spared on the servers that can handle that.
MY ONLY CONCERN really, is that room we see of Intrepid Studios in the background in all the Youtube and Twitch interviews seems… a little small. A game this huge seems like you’d have more staff.
We are beyond excited Steven.
No Pressure
-An SWG player since launch day until the NGE ruined everything- (Mastered 25 professions, no unlock )
We have been waiting for you. Years and Years. The Ancients foretold that there would be another..MMORPG worthy.
We like everything so far for the most part.
Keep it hard and never cater to the casual player.
It’s all about economy. Make crafting hard. Make resources dynamic spawns (changing every 10-21 days randomly) Have resources have some sort of quality to them (random), so that over time, as better resources spawn, crafted items get even better. “Does anybody have 1000 units of that reindeer hide that spawned 5 months ago? Paying 10 CPU!” is a good thread to see in the trade forums.
Have creatures and the world spawn good items, and bad. Also have super rare ones drop with DOT’s, that cannot be duplicated by crafters. Because of decay and breakage, this will be ok.
Back in SWG, half the server would meet in Theed to see some player, who got an uber drop, just to have him show it to you in the trade window, then accept the /duel, and die with pleasure to it. These weapons would be so powerful, that the player would RE-GRIND his character to a class that could use it, or sell it.
Don’t have the server drop too many weapons or armor or potions or …let crafters make it most of it. There is nothing like watching the evolution of a server from launch, and armor and weapons slowly getting better over time because of resource shifts, or new looted schematics. Don’t forget the power of looted schematics. Don’t forget you can cap how many of this uber schematics product I can make if need be, to control rarity.
Take it from a former Master Armorsmith AND Chef in SWG….twice (ground 2 characters with same spec) Make it hard and painful, almost impossible, for those upper levels of whatever you have planned for us in the crafting world. I know what it’s like to click and break 2 mice from grinding Ubese Armor shirts 73,962 times 2 weeks straight……..cuz once you get to Master…everything changes.
The secret to a good economy is to not have server drops nullify crafters experience. The game gets ruined when a character has all his ‘purple tier 4 gear’ from drops.
Please don’t have static spawns for resources…nothing is worse, than knowing ‘there are always 3 cotton nodes over by Sunnybrook river’, only to find it camped eternally.
Don’t do it.
Dynamic spawns that move is key.
Don’t worry. Us die hards (and it doesn’t take too many) will find it.
We love you Steven for no or very rare flying mounts/ limited fast travel.
We love you for decay and no Pay to Win.
We love you for no bound items!
Keep the Flag and Temporary Enemy Flag (TEF) system for pvp and caravans..brilliant!
If two weeks into official game launch, I see or hear about there already being a level 80 (or whatever max is at launch) Tank or Mage, your game has failed, always remember this!
Make those upper levels take OBSCENE amounts of experience to get….
Too many alt’s on one account ruins a server as well. I’ll just keep making characters to fill the void that supply and demand has left open. I’m fine with buying a second account and paying for 2 years’ worth of subs for 2 accounts.
Getting a city to Metropolis level needs to be fricking insanely hard, expensive, and time consuming. Casual players can always join the city later, but let the die hards, who are all 35 years old +with super PC’s, shape the world, and inspire newer players, who think WoW is a good game.
We are the ones who will take 1 week Paid Time Off to sync with launch day with our guild (after doing a dry run or 2 in Alpha and Beta) to execute our plan and get our node.
We are the ones who spent $100 + on kickstarter for a game 2 years away, because some guy on the internet (You Steven) has said ALL the right things in your videos.
Keep mentioning Evercrack 1 and 2 and SWG in all your press releases. (That’s what drew me and my friend’s attention to Ashes of Creation)
Allow us to drag and resize our GUI from launch..not some patch later.
Built in Discord..Great! You are already ahead of me.
Emotes with animations /dance of course!. Don’t forget /pizza
8 races..great! have 9 languages. (basic plus 8 races) Let me learn a language from another player, or maybe even quests. (Don’t forget Role-Players!)
10,000 concurrent players! ? really… this is epic. I sure hope no expense is spared on the servers that can handle that.
MY ONLY CONCERN really, is that room we see of Intrepid Studios in the background in all the Youtube and Twitch interviews seems… a little small. A game this huge seems like you’d have more staff.
We are beyond excited Steven.
No Pressure
-An SWG player since launch day until the NGE ruined everything- (Mastered 25 professions, no unlock )
0
Comments
i agree that crafting should be hard and take forever to master
i agree that if someone hits max level 1 week into the game the game has failed, even though that player obviously hasnt actually played the game. this always makes me said when i hear someone has max leveled a game less than a week after release.
i loved the language learning from other races in EQ and hope it is included in this as well as other trainable skills such as swimming etc.
only thing i didnt really agree with is "Too many alt’s on one account ruins a server as well."
i am an alt-aholic and love playing all classes and having different toons for my different classes when i play. i even created shadow priest and holy priest as separate alts just cos i didnt want to have to change spec builds :)
if someone wants to spend the time leveling skills and alts which i assume would be just as hard as the first toons leveling then good on them. i mean thats some serious play time they are investing :)
or at least i hope it would be some serious play time they have to invest.
basically I said, i agree with almost all you have said except for the alts thing. i am an altaholic and cant help but love playing all the classes and races. i always hate being pigeon-holed into choosing a "main". so annoying. i like all the characters i make and play them all pretty much equally normally. i am hoping for 1 character slot per race if possible :)
i especially loved the language learning skills in EQ and spent many an hour leveling it up with other people. would love that to be integrated into AoC as well as other skills you can level as you use them, like swimming etc. and a reporting system on it like skills in BDO would be cool too.
Personally I despise the revolving gamers who are all hard core pvp griefers. We all know those types,a game launches with pvp open world and for the first couple months your constantly harassed by the "aww man I ganked you! Stole yer shit hahahaha" You know the childish nonsense because they more then anything else chase players away from the game. Look to Archeage and Black Desert as examples. Archeage in particular is a ghost town because of that. The hardcore pvpers who are just out to grief effectively killed that game and they in mass move on to the next to continue the cycle of killing a game.
That being said It is my hope that this game will be different and not have that one awful aspect of pvp. Personally I love pvp in battlegrounds, sieges and the caravan scenarios.
My 2 cents
Twist
Personally I despise the revolving gamers who are all hard core pvp griefers. We all know those types,a game launches with pvp open world and for the first couple months your constantly harassed by the “aww man I ganked you! Stole yer shit hahahaha” You know the childish nonsense because they more then anything else chase players away from the game. Look to Archeage and Black Desert as examples. Archeage in particular is a ghost town because of that. The hardcore pvpers who are just out to grief effectively killed that game and they in mass move on to the next to continue the cycle of killing a game.
That being said It is my hope that this game will be different and not have that one awful aspect of pvp. Personally I love pvp in battlegrounds, sieges and the caravan scenarios.
My 2 cents
Twist
[/quote]
This game won't be a open gank box , even if they have to change the current plans for pvp they will tell they get the right balance of what they want for the pvp rules.
- Random nodes
- Slow down the leveling experience like the old school MMORPG. People enjoys leveling and the actual developers forgot this aspect.
- Make the crafters great again
- Do a minimal drop rate on some legendary items in Open World
-etc etc.
GL Steven!
I want to see things break too and have to be replaced not repaired. I dont want to be a repair bot just like you can put in any game where you click on a button and everything is fixed. I want to make dozens of weapons that will be bought all the time. I loved that type of game play.
I think today's servers should be able to have 20K+ players playing at any given time. Look at Private WOW servers where they had 17K people connected and that was not even a VMware worthy server for a VM Host. Yes 20K+ can easily be done.
There is only 1 way I will except someone is max level in 3 weeks. If they played 20 hours a day for 20 days. If someone does that and is that obscene than fine, thats 400 hours of game play. Then they will be so burnt out they will not want to play anymore after that.
We have been waiting for you. Years and Years. The Ancients foretold that there would be another..MMORPG worthy.
We like everything so far for the most part.
Keep it hard and never cater to the casual player.
[/quote]
It's when I see posts like this that I wish I could vote up.
I'm not sure we'll get all of it, but hopefully we'll get the spirit of the old days back.
Ex-SWG player
You did bring up some really solid points. The crafting issue is a problem in ESO right now. Dropped gear is far better than crafted gear, plus they can't make jewelry. It would be nice to see that kind of economy again. Even in LOTRO the AH is fairly empty for certain things because everyone just has an alt to make whatever they need. Not nearly as much trade as there used to be for crafted items.
I look forward to the game and hope things flesh out the way they are talking about now. The only rough thing is waiting for a year and a half to see it release. lol. Damn right I'll be playing in alpha and beta testing though, so there's that. ;-)
I'm an altoholic. We are many. We are I.
That said, I query whether a game as complex as SWG will ever happen again. Even in an era where MMO gamers were -- I'll come out and say it -- more hardcore, SWG really struggled. Pushing a game <em>too far</em> in that direction today will lose the audience.
Notice I said <em>too far</em>. I think there are plenty of things to take away from SWG. I really do. But it always needs to be held up against what today's average gamer is like. And with the original version of SWG unable to find a real market (which is what led to the CU and NGE that we all hated), in an age full of totally hardcore MMO gamers, you can only imagine what it would be like now. So take away the best of SWG style gameplay, sure. Copy heaps of it? No :)
[/quote]
I do think there should be *some* RNG in crafting (and this is coming from a hardcore crafter :) What a skilled crafter should have is a way to mitigate RNG (make it less impactful). The reason for this is that it's kind of boring (and unrealistic) to combine items to get a specific item output with specific stats.
Some RNG would allow a variance and that same element of surprise you get from monster loot, but skilled crafters could mitigate how wide the effect go RNG could be.
For example, if you build a sword with Pristine Mithril (as opposed to Rare Mithirl, Regular Mihtril etc) that might mean you could end up with up to +10 agility with a base random modifier of +/- 3. Will appropriate skill, perhaps the crafter could modify the modifier so the RNG can't swing quite as low. That kind of thing.
I really would like to see items with not just rarity, but quality (condition) and properties too... that's another post, though (which I might have actually made already, I need to search :)
Progress rarely equals 'unique' effort.
Progress usually equals a repetitive scripted grind.
A script that can itself be scripted by bots.
Multibox Bots that can play 24/7/365.
Pay2Win people that pay people to play their accounts 24/7/365
So even the basement dweller becomes inferior to the botters and the P2W employers.
Makes a fallacy of the 'effort' argument doesnt it.
And here we go with the + this + that + everywhere + everything
Just an ever escalating arms race that builds an artificial player gap, making old content and old gear obsolete.
People will never learn. I despair. I really do.
More of the same trash then.
"Keep it hard and never cater to the casual player. "
I was interested right up this point.
Then I realised you was just another player trying to exclude half the community.
Just another player trying to flame/troll the forum.
You read the TOC right ?
I am somewhere in between casual and power player. I play, but I am not casual about it. I don't get hardcore where I figure out how to use the maximum efficiency of time to get everything I want in a game. (I've played lotro for 10 years now and my highest character is level 69 out of 105 levels)
I think the fact that "time" is going to be a significant factor with nodes, upgrades, sieges, etc., is going to be beneficial to that concern. Just because you and your guild get together and help monster's stock go up because you buy enough to stay up for a month straight, doesn't mean you're going to be max level and have a metropolis 1 week after release. At the same time, even the casual player who plays for a few hours each week will provide benefit to the node. Not as much as Captain Monster drinker, but that isn't a realistic thing to try to accomplish.
As often as I switch playing games, I look forward to the substantial differences in each server's world based on actual player actions. But, I will also be eager to get involved in some of those significant player activities that actually change the situation on that server's world.
I'm an altoholic. We are Many. We are I.
[/quote]
Are you kidding I LOVED the Jedi Quest line it made Jedi Rare in a world that was a time where Lore wise they were supposed to be and as one of the few that made that journey before they gave Jedi as a Class (stupid mistake) you felt EPIC and Legendary at the same time just turning on your lightsaber in town. I was super upset that the DK from wow did not have an epic quest line to unlock
[/quote]
Jobs? Lives? What is this heresy?
“Keep it hard and never cater to the casual player. ”
I was interested right up this point.
Then I realised you was just another player trying to exclude half the community.
Just another player trying to flame/troll the forum.
You read the TOC right ?
[/quote]
No troll here..
Casual players from what I've read about this game so far, will have plenty to do. I just don't want another SWG PreCU vs SWG NGE to happen.
That is where Star Wars Galaxies took a beautiful 32 profession game based off of skill points, and crushed it down to 7 and added Jedi as a class. (Made everything easier and 'simple')
That was catering to the casual player.
It ruined the game.
Most of my alt's, will be casually played myself, but for my main crafter...I want his path long and hard and rewarding. And if we end up on same server, you'll be glad Prong, the Master Armorsmith (or whatever), is on your server.
[quote quote=19130]Letter to Steven from Star Wars Galaxies (PreCU) player(s)
We have been waiting for you. Years and Years. The Ancients foretold that there would be another..MMORPG worthy.
We like everything so far for the most part.
Keep it hard and never cater to the casual player.
It’s all about economy. Make crafting hard. Make resources dynamic spawns (changing every 10-21 days randomly) Have resources have some sort of quality to them (random), so that over time, as better resources spawn, crafted items get even better. “Does anybody have 1000 units of that reindeer hide that spawned 5 months ago? Paying 10 CPU!” is a good thread to see in the trade forums.
Have creatures and the world spawn good items, and bad. Also have super rare ones drop with DOT’s, that cannot be duplicated by crafters. Because of decay and breakage, this will be ok.
Back in SWG, half the server would meet in Theed to see some player, who got an uber drop, just to have him show it to you in the trade window, then accept the /duel, and die with pleasure to it. These weapons would be so powerful, that the player would RE-GRIND his character to a class that could use it, or sell it.
Don’t have the server drop too many weapons or armor or potions or …let crafters make it most of it. There is nothing like watching the evolution of a server from launch, and armor and weapons slowly getting better over time because of resource shifts, or new looted schematics. Don’t forget the power of looted schematics. Don’t forget you can cap how many of this uber schematics product I can make if need be, to control rarity.
Take it from a former Master Armorsmith AND Chef in SWG….twice (ground 2 characters with same spec) Make it hard and painful, almost impossible, for those upper levels of whatever you have planned for us in the crafting world. I know what it’s like to click and break 2 mice from grinding Ubese Armor shirts 73,962 times 2 weeks straight……..cuz once you get to Master…everything changes.
The secret to a good economy is to not have server drops nullify crafters experience. The game gets ruined when a character has all his ‘purple tier 4 gear’ from drops.
Please don’t have static spawns for resources…nothing is worse, than knowing ‘there are always 3 cotton nodes over by Sunnybrook river’, only to find it camped eternally.
Don’t do it.
Dynamic spawns that move is key.
Don’t worry. Us die hards (and it doesn’t take too many) will find it.
We love you Steven for no or very rare flying mounts/ limited fast travel.
We love you for decay and no Pay to Win.
We love you for no bound items!
Keep the Flag and Temporary Enemy Flag (TEF) system for pvp and caravans..brilliant!
If two weeks into official game launch, I see or hear about there already being a level 80 (or whatever max is at launch) Tank or Mage, your game has failed, always remember this!
Make those upper levels take OBSCENE amounts of experience to get….
Too many alt’s on one account ruins a server as well. I’ll just keep making characters to fill the void that supply and demand has left open. I’m fine with buying a second account and paying for 2 years’ worth of subs for 2 accounts.
Getting a city to Metropolis level needs to be fricking insanely hard, expensive, and time consuming. Casual players can always join the city later, but let the die hards, who are all 35 years old +with super PC’s, shape the world, and inspire newer players, who think WoW is a good game.
We are the ones who will take 1 week Paid Time Off to sync with launch day with our guild (after doing a dry run or 2 in Alpha and Beta) to execute our plan and get our node.
We are the ones who spent $100 + on kickstarter for a game 2 years away, because some guy on the internet (You Steven) has said ALL the right things in your videos.
Keep mentioning Evercrack 1 and 2 and SWG in all your press releases. (That’s what drew me and my friend’s attention to Ashes of Creation)
Allow us to drag and resize our GUI from launch..not some patch later.
Built in Discord..Great! You are already ahead of me.
Emotes with animations /dance of course!. Don’t forget /pizza
8 races..great! have 9 languages. (basic plus 8 races) Let me learn a language from another player, or maybe even quests. (Don’t forget Role-Players!)
10,000 concurrent players! ? really… this is epic. I sure hope no expense is spared on the servers that can handle that.
MY ONLY CONCERN really, is that room we see of Intrepid Studios in the background in all the Youtube and Twitch interviews seems… a little small. A game this huge seems like you’d have more staff.
We are beyond excited Steven.
No Pressure
-An SWG player since launch day until the NGE ruined everything- (Mastered 25 professions, no unlock )
[/quote]
Im from Bria PRONG and I totally agree!
Have creatures and the world spawn good items, and bad. Also have super rare ones drop with DOT’s, that cannot be duplicated by crafters. Because of decay and breakage, this will be ok.
Back in SWG, half the server would meet in Theed to see some player, who got an uber drop, just to have him show it to you in the trade window, then accept the /duel, and die with pleasure to it. These weapons would be so powerful, that the player would RE-GRIND his character to a class that could use it, or sell it.
[/quote]
This <code>:thumbsup:</code>
<div class="d4p-bbt-quote-title"><a href="https://www.ashesofcreation.com/forums/topic/letter-to-steven-from-star-wars-galaxies-precu-players-2/#post-19196" rel="nofollow">Helzbelz wrote:</a></div>
I agree with the OP. Stuff needs to take a good amount of time. I remember spending 300 or so hours leveling my weaponsmith. This is a good thing because in the end it was all worth it. <strong>The only grind I do not want to see is the Jedi grind, that was very very stupid.</strong>
</blockquote>
Are you kidding I LOVED the Jedi Quest line it made Jedi Rare in a world that was a time where Lore wise they were supposed to be and as one of the few that made that journey before they gave Jedi as a Class (stupid mistake) you felt EPIC and Legendary at the same time just turning on your lightsaber in town. I was super upset that the DK from wow did not have an epic quest line to unlock
[/quote]
Jedi could be fun. But I knew several people that had to grind 20+ classes just to get their 3rd class so they could become a jedi. The Holocrons were a bad idea.
SWG : Starsider server.....
If NGE had never happen I would still be playing SWG today (If it was still around)
To bad Bioware went the way of the WOW.
<div class="d4p-bbt-quote-title"><a href="https://www.ashesofcreation.com/forums/topic/letter-to-steven-from-star-wars-galaxies-precu-players-2/page/2/#post-20460" rel="nofollow">Dredguard wrote:</a></div>
<blockquote>
<div class="d4p-bbt-quote-title"><a href="https://www.ashesofcreation.com/forums/topic/letter-to-steven-from-star-wars-galaxies-precu-players-2/#post-19196" rel="nofollow">Helzbelz wrote:</a></div>
I agree with the OP. Stuff needs to take a good amount of time. I remember spending 300 or so hours leveling my weaponsmith. This is a good thing because in the end it was all worth it. <strong>The only grind I do not want to see is the Jedi grind, that was very very stupid.</strong>
</blockquote>
Are you kidding I LOVED the Jedi Quest line it made Jedi Rare in a world that was a time where Lore wise they were supposed to be and as one of the few that made that journey before they gave Jedi as a Class (stupid mistake) you felt EPIC and Legendary at the same time just turning on your lightsaber in town. I was super upset that the DK from wow did not have an epic quest line to unlock
</blockquote>
Jedi could be fun. But I knew several people that had to grind 20+ classes just to get their 3rd class so they could become a jedi. The Holocrons were a bad idea.
</blockquote>
I took 31 if I remember correctly, Haha. Played on Sunrunner with most of my friends who're looking forward to AoC as well. Leveling up most professions in star wars didn't really take that long, eq and eq2 probably took a little longer.
The problem with the jedi grind wasn't so much the grind but that everyone was swapping professions and that threw the personalities and ideas of the characters out of whack. Even our server's top weaponsmith took a break to train up other classes for his jedi grind.
I have faith that the vision of the Intrepid team is sound. Whether the game turns out more catered towards hardcore or casual is all fine. They don't seem to be a team that'll make compromises to their core game experience just to squeeze a few more bucks out of their customers.
This is in the SWGemu project.
2 boxing night sisters for nice poisoned weapons and skill tapes (errgh skill tapes) was a relatively enjoyable task for me as well. Ahhh, memories.
That being said, I'm not too worried at the moment about whether AoC will be catered to hardcore or casual players. Whether something is leveled quickly or not isn't really an issue, not everything took a long time to level up in swg either. I do hope the player dependencies and a strong crafter scene will be part of the AoC core features. As much as I look back at SWG for features that made it such a memorable experience, I'm very much looking forward to see what improvements Intrepid can bring to the genre.If nodes work as well as they say it will it'd be great!
Intrepid studios seems to have a firm understanding on what old school gamers want and I have confidence that any compromises that they decide to make (hardcore vs. casual etc.) eventually will be for the betterment of the game and not just to squeeze out a few more bucks from their players. (*finger crossed* hoping that I don't have to eat my words a few years down the line. haha :D)
Even though I unlocked Jedi finally at the 33rd profession (essentially doing up all) with help from @Shansation and the TPE guild, my favourite part about SWG would be the seemingly endless scale of their game scenes.
On a planet like Naboo, I could scoot around on a bike or a pimped out landspeeder for minutes to hours on end and "disappear" from the world so to speak if I want to.
Chilling with friends in a secret cave behind an extensive waterfall feature after climbing up a cliff was a highlight for me as well.
Alternatively, I could be mired in a faraway swamp on some deserted planet harvesting mats for crafters so that I could earn some much needed credits.
The game introduced scale to me in an MMO like never before. And I'm thankful for the experience.
If AoC can reproduce vast expanses of land like in SWG or Vanguard, the game would bring back world scale and meaningful travel, immersing and spacing us out in a believable system free of an ostentatious themepark feel.
The vision of Steven Sharif and his team coincides with mine and many. Let's enjoy the process, and continue supporting what we believe in, and make it happen.
"SPACE! UMJI LIKE!!"